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Lincoln's Centenary 



Speech 

of the 
Brazilian Ambassador 

JOAQUIM NABUCO 

at the celebration in Washington of Lincoln's Centenary 

organized by the Commissioners of the District of Columbia 

February 12th, 1909 



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l5y 'I'r&.nsrtir 

JUl i4 1917 



LINCOLN'S CENTENARY 



It was not without much hesitation that I accepted 
to speak by the side of the distinguished men chosen 
to address you on this great occasion, but when I was 
told that I would represent here the sentiment of Latin 
America I felt that that was a call I could not fail to 
answer. 

The presence at this place of any single foreign na- 
tion would be a sufficient acknowledgment that Lin- 
coln belongs to all the world. But there are reasons 
why the other nations of this continent feel themselves 
more closely associated with him than the rest of the 
world, and why they owe him the greater gratitude 
after that of the United States. 

We are bound indeed to form with you a political 
moral unit and no man, after Washington, has done 
more than Lincoln to strengthen the magnet that at- 
tracts us to you. Washington created the American 
freedom, Lincoln purified it. 

Personally I owe to Lincoln not only the choice, but 
the easy fulfillment of what I consider was my task in 
life, as it was the task of so many others: the emanci- 
pation of the slaves. Nobody indeed could say what 
would have been the struggle for abolition in Brazil, 
if, past the middle of the 19th century, a new and pow- 
erful Nation had sprung up in America having for its 
creed the maintenance and the expansion of slavery. 
Through what Lincoln did, owing to the great light he 
kindled for all the world with his Proclamation, we 



could win our cause without a drop of blood being 
shed. In fact, we won it in a national embrace, the 
slave-owners themselves emulating, with the lavishness 
of their letters of manumission, the action of the laws 
of freedom, successively enacted. 

Lincoln, like Washington, is one of the few great 
men in history about whom the moral sense of man- 
kind is not divided. His record is throughout one of 
inspiration. His part at the White House was that of 
the national Fate. To-day, when one looks from this 
distance of time to the fields of that terrible Civil War, 
one sees in them not only the shortest cut, but the only 
possible road, to a common national destiny. I con- 
strue to myself that War as one of those illusions of 
life, in which men seem to move of their own free will, 
while they are really playing a tragedy composed by 
a Providence intent on saving their nation from the 
course she was pursuing. Nobody can say what would 
have been the duration of slavery, if the Southern 
States had not acted as they did. By seceding they 
doomed it to death and saved themselves. In that way 
the Secession, although a wholly different episode, will 
have had in the history of the United States the same 
effect that had in the history of Rome the secession of 
the people to the Sacred Mount in the early period of 
the Republic; that is that of cementing the national 
unity and of assuring the destiny of the nation for cen- 
turies of ever widening power. 

Lincoln, with the special sense distributed by the 
author of that great play to one entrusted with its 
loading part, saw distinctly that the South was not a 
nationality, and that it would not think of being one, 
except during the hallucination of the crisis. If the 
South had been a nationality, the North with all its 



strength would not have subdued it. Neither the 
American people would care to have a foreign nation 
attached to its side by conquest, nor a coerced nation, 
after such a bloody war, would re-enter the Union in 
the spirit of staying forever, as the South did, once 
spent the passion that moved it to secede. 

I believe such was also the feeling of General Lee 
during the whole campaign; only he could not utter 
it, and the secret died with him. But only such a feel- 
ing could have kept his surrender free from all bitter- 
ness, as if he had only fought a duel of honor for the 
South. I am glad to speak those words before the 
great Southern writer, Mr. Nelson Page, whose books 
do not only tell the gallantry and chivalrousness of the 
old South, but, like ever so many lacrymatories, shall 
keep, as undying tears, the poetry of slavery, the charm 
of that unique tie between the faithful slaves and the 
grateful master, of whose family they really made part. 
Nothing is so beautiful to me in the celebration of this 
first centenary of Lincoln as the tributes of men who 
represent the noblest spirit of the South. 

I came here to say a word, I have said it. With the 
increased velocity of modern changes, we do not know 
what the world will be a hundred years hence. For 
sure, the ideals of the generation of the year 2000 will 
not be the same of the generation of the year 1900. 
Nations will then be governed by currents of political 
thought which we can no more anticipate than the 
17th century could anticipate the political currents of 
the 18th, which still in part sway us. But, whether 
the spirit of authority, or that of freedom, increases, 
Lincoln's legend will ever appear more luminous in the 
amalgamation of centuries, because he supremely in- 
carnated both those spirits. And this veneration for 



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Lincoln's memory, throughout the world, is bound 
more and more to center in this City, which was the 
exclusive theatre of his glory, and which alone could 
reflect the anxieties and the elations of his heart during 
the whole performance of his great part in history. 
For the site of his great national shrine, Washing- 
ton has the predominant title of being the place of his 
martyrdom. 

I am proud of having spoken here at his first Centen- 
nial in the name of Latin America. We all owe to Lin- 
coln the immense debt of having fixed forever the free 
character of the American civilization. 



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